The SD-WAN market is white-hot, as buyers are turning to the technology to cost-effectively meet burgeoning bandwidth demands while realizing benefits such as simplified WAN management and better application performance.
In fact, there is so much upside to SD-WAN that vendors and service providers new and old are rushing to stake a claim, roiling the still young market. As the CEO of a company that supplies an SD-WAN, I believe you can expect to see the following major developments take place in 2018:
1. Industry consolidation has been the watchword and will continue through 2018.
In August, Cisco acquired SD-WAN player Viptela, and in early November, VMware announced it was acquiring VeloCloud. In just the SD-WAN appliance space alone there are some 40 providers, so it goes without saying that more market consolidation is in the cards for 2018.
While that contraction will simplify the supplier landscape, it will require enterprise buyers to do more homework as the acquiring companies work to integrate various product lines. For example, how will Cisco’s iWAN portfolio evolve now that the company has swallowed Viptela?
With the players in flux and WAN edge strategies continuously evolving, buyers may be forced to re-evaluate their SD-WAN strategy on an annual basis.
2. SD-WAN adoption will tilt away from an appliance-only model and shift toward an as-a-service solution.
2018 will be the year of as-a-service SD-WANs, as enterprise buyers have tired of puzzling together SD-WAN solutions from ever-changing piece parts. The SD-WAN services that will prove to be most desirable are the ones that virtualize the WAN end-to-end instead of relying on internet backbone links (which are prone to congestion) between virtualized edge components.
Many companies today are also replacing their static MPLS backbones and opting for software-defined WANs -- a trend that will become more prevalent in 2018.
3. Security capabilities will become part of critical purchase criteria and drive new innovation.
As SD-WAN competition intensifies, suppliers will trot out additional capabilities to make their offerings more appealing. Some companies, for example, now offer additional security options.
However, security add-ons aren’t going to help much if the underlying integrity of the SD-WAN platform doesn’t deliver table stakes such as end-to-end encryption. When it comes to SD-WAN delivered as a service, you have to ensure data is encrypted in transit and that the physical device has been vetted by top third-party security firms.
But security options will become critical purchasing considerations in 2018, especially when supporting cloud-based applications. Large enterprises will continue following a best-of-breed strategy for things like firewalls and opt to bundle that functionality into their SD-WAN purchase.
4. SaaS-first enterprise initiatives will accelerate the adoption of SD-WAN.
The protocols that support cloud/SaaS applications and the shift to the cloud will continue to accelerate, so we can expect SD-WAN players to focus more of their efforts on cloud optimization in 2018.
Cloud migration is one of the key drivers of SD-WAN adoption. Many service providers offer direct connections to IaaS offerings from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, but organizations such as GE and others are putting a priority on SaaS, and legacy MPLS providers don’t have an answer for that. That means enterprise buyers reaching for SaaS will be looking to SD-WAN to improve their application performance.
5. Global enterprises will realize deploying SD-WAN over the internet will not address application performance issues.
Using the internet as the underlying transport can offer a low-cost, flexible and rapid deployment option for regional SD-WANs, but companies with globally distributed branch offices need to look at the bigger picture, especially if the SD-WAN will be used to support links to cloud/SaaS applications.
Companies that rely on SD-WANs using internet links in a global deployment will sacrifice application performance, user experience and productivity. Latency, packet loss and jitter are inherent to the internet, and these issues are exaggerated when data crosses oceans or travels long distances. Internet-based SD-WANs also cannot commit to SLAs, so IT leaders don’t know what to expect in terms of reliability and application performance.
6. Enterprise buyers will wake up to the fact that many SD-WAN tools don’t have an adequate mobile strategy.
With over 40% of employees today working remotely, you’ll see SD-WAN suppliers scrambling to accommodate this large and growing part of the workforce. Vendors that rely on SD-WAN appliances, for example, can’t expect workers to carry around those gizmos and the soft clients that some offer instead quickly become a management nightmare in terms of tracking who has downloaded what version and when, virtually ensuring an uptick in support calls. Expect to see more suppliers strive to offer clientless SD-WAN.
7. IoT will fuel the adoption of SD-WAN.
The internet of things is already making inroads in several industries, including medical devices, manufacturing (through robotics) and power and gas distribution, and it's only the beginning. As billions of new devices and systems will need to be connected to each other, the amount of traffic across enterprise networks will grow exponentially. The key requirement for any IoT deployment to be a success is the real-time delivery of data to all stakeholders. The reason SD-WAN appeals to IT leaders for their IoT-based applications over legacy network technologies is the promise of simplified network deployment, centralized control and real-time application delivery.
8. SD-WAN tools will adopt machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to take WANs to the next level.
One of the advantages of SD-WANs is the network becomes aware of the needs of the applications it supports and can react accordingly. And in 2018, we’ll start to see more efforts to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve on those capabilities. The potential is there, for example, to predict network behavior in real time and route traffic over the best path, thereby using machine learning algorithms to identify network issues before the customer even feels them.
You can expect these and other SD-WAN developments to unfold in in 2018 because the one prediction guaranteed to come true is this: This fast-growing and still evolving SD-WAN market will continue to attract vendor investment and buyer interest.
